Change, Labelless

Change is all around us.

And change, as witnesses of nature, can be viewed as remarkably beautiful. 

Caterpillars metamorphose into butterflies, baby birds gain the skills and courage to fly, calfs age into mothers and bear offspring of their own. 

But when we put change in the context of human beings, it’s often viewed in a dimmer light. 

We hear phrases like “i miss the old you,” or “the good old days”, as though the past is what we should be yearning for. As though the changes that happened weren’t necessarily for the better. 

But the person sharing these phrases has changed too. Maybe the old you may fits with the current them better. Maybe their present is complicated and difficult, so they look to the past at a glimpse of simpler times when life seemed to be going the direction they so hoped. 

We often forget this.

So we take their remarks on our change at face value. We link others’ feelings about our change and how we view change; they don’t like our change, we don’t like our change. 

Thus change, in our head, is considered an inevitable, chiefly negative, occurrence.

The relationships we build with people change, the people we decide to spend the most time with change, the things you once loved may not be of much importance to you anymore.

And we think all of this is bad. We look at old pictures and think to ourselves, "I wish things could have stayed the same."

Sometimes, oftentimes, we even feel guilty. As though we should have somehow resisted the ever-natural tendency to evolve. 

In these moments of guilt, we forget all the new passions we gained, the paths we’ve carved,  the new friendships we’ve developed, the enhanced sense of inner peace. These were such obviously good things. They didn’t cause you pain. They shaped the person that you are. That you love. Change seemed to be very kind to you. 

And then we take these changes, these changes that we’ve classified as positive, and again remember that these internal changes have brought you farther from some friends, places, and things and closer to others. We classify such byproduct changes as negative.

Dissonance at it’s finest- you know the change in a lot of ways has made your life more full, but you notice others’ disappointed reactions to your change and you feel wrong. 

At first, I thought ok well maybe I just need to stop classifying the byproduct changes as negative and I’ll feel better. The people I couldn’t talk to as much because of the hard work I’d committed myself to, the habits and people that my personal reflection revealed didn’t possess the qualities I now prioritized, the people I stopped looking up to because I’d found that my opinions had strayed from theirs, I should call them all positives. 

But I tried that, and somehow compared to all of the clearly positive changes- the hard work, the modified priorities, the newly established opinions- the byproduct changes still seemed to barely scrape the cutoff for positive. 

Anytime we call something good, positive, better, we automatically create another category of bad, negative, and worse.

So the real shift in mindset that allowed me to embrace change instead of fear it or treat is as my source of guilt was learning to think of change as neutral. 

Like experience, change is simply a process dependent on time. 

We call it bad or good based on how it affects our life, but change at its root is a natural process. 

Otherwise, we wouldn’t use the same word to describe an instance when a morally sound human turned into a serial killer and the first time a baby learned to walk. Both of these are products of change. 

By allowing change to be viewed as neutral, we gain a sense of control; we get to decide whether a change is good or not. It wasn’t handed to us in a certain way. 

We get to make what we want of it and believe what we want from it. 

We become less susceptible to believing that our change is bad when a person is disappointed with our change or when someone says that they “miss the old you.” Because we know, at its core, change is merely an occurrence and whether or not we think fondly of it is up to us. 

Our morals, our views, our opinions, after witnessing change, help determine that the man who turned into a serial killer is bad and the baby that learned to crawl is good. 

Change doesn’t decide what’s good for us, we do. 

So those changed relationships, those memories of days spent doing things with people you wouldn’t necessarily repeat again aren’t sealed in a negative box. 

They are just consequences of change. 

And when people say they want to change for the better, they do so knowing which changes made their life better and decide to mimic these changes. Again, it was the human that made the change feel good. 

Handling change can be uncomfortable or confusing, but, knowing that what you make of change and how you classify your change are in your hands, can make change seem like a powerful tool for a fulfilling life.